Blog Tour | The Bitches Of Suburbia #GuestPost

Today I have a guest post from author Jane Owen about her road to publication but first here is what her book is about.

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Nothing much ever happened on Horseshoe Lane – why should it? It was, after all, just a normal suburban backwater with the usual cross section of growing families, ageing pensioners, the occasional singleton and a brace of curtain twitchers. The arrival of celebrity couple, Heavenly and Travis, however, changes all that. This glamorous pair bring about a summer of competitive party throwing and ambitious home improvement projects that will have disastrous and completely unforeseen consequences.

Neighbours who’ve got by for years with just the occasional chat over a garden fence about the unseasonable amount of rain or the state of next door’s garden are slowly united by suspicion as a husband goes missing, a much loved cat turns up dead on a doorstep and Enid from Number Seven is found badly injured at the foot of the cliff.

Could one person be responsible for all of this? Could that person be the strange and unlikeable Hilary Jones from Number Nine? There was only going to be one way to find out and it was going to involve a lot of whiskey….

In this her wonderful follow up to ‘The Rock Star Known as Horse’, Owen’s riveting new story finds a murky side to the suburbs, a side where petty jealousies and neighbourly rivalries can escalate out of all control with calamitous results, all intricately observed with her usual dark humour firmly to the fore.

My road to publication has been long and extremely winding. Some might say I started at the top and worked my way down. Back in the 1990s I was working for a music business manager, a man who represented some of the biggest artists on the planet which sounds a lot more fun and/or glamourous than it actually was. None of the acts was recording or touring, they were all off playing golf or trout fishing and I was just sat in an office all day bored out of my mind. So I wrote a book. Camden Girls. Shortly after I finished writing it, I went to a gig in Camden and the drummer’s girlfriend was a reader for a top literary agent. Long story short, he signed me (the agent, not the drummer) and sold the book to Penguin. Publication was followed by a whirlwind of translation rights, foreign promotional trips, two film deals, photo shoots for glossy magazines, TV and radio interviews and I’ll hold my hands up, I was young and it’s entirely possible that I enjoyed my somewhat extended fifteen minutes of fame just a bit too much.

The thing was, while I’d been out and about living life in the moderately fast lane, publishing seemed to change and genre fiction became the holy grail for publishers. Chick lit, crime, young adult, nobody seemed to want stand alone books that didn’t really fit into any genre.

It took me a while, my confidence was severely dented by endless rejections along the lines of ‘We love how you write, but we don’t know where to place you’ but then Kindle came along and the world of publishing changed again. It can be daunting, it can be technically challenging if you’re not that way inclined (and believe me, I’m not!) but it’s very rewarding. I love the reviews although to be fair I haven’t had any bad ones but it makes my day when a complete stranger takes the time to write something nice.

This is my second self published book and I plan many more. There’s a delicious freedom to self publishing, it allows me to be a writer and have a life. I get to work at my own pace, with no pressure and whereas a deadline tends to turn me into a rabbit in the headlights, doing it for my self brings out the disciplined side of me because I still get to do the other things I love, like riding my horses, walking the dog, seeing friends. My week day routine is simple: I ride in the mornings, write in the afternoons, take the dog for an early evening walk, have dinner with the one I love. Job done.

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If you want to find out more about the book then be sure to check out the other tour stops.

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Jane’s first novel, Camden Girls, was published by Penguin twenty years ago and quickly became an international cult bestseller published in many languages including Japanese, Spanish,German, Hebrew, Italian and Dutch. She’d already spent many years working in the film business working alongside stars such as Christophe Lambert, Andi McDowell, Daryl Hannah and James Remar before switching to the music business and working for bands such as The Who, Robert Plant, ZZTop and many more. Eventually, even that got boring and that’s when she wrote Camden Girls.

After publication, life became interrupted by an unfortunate traffic accident and Jane moved out of London to Sussex and slowly returned to writing. Her novels don’t fit into any specific category and, frustrated by endless rejections along the lines of ‘You write beautifully but we don’t know how to sell this book’ she started self publishing. Rave reviews gave her the confidence to keep going and believe in what she was writing.

She’s still in Sussex, sharing her life with her musician partner, three horses and a dog and divides her day between writing and riding.